chrisamico.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

thread - 18F had effects far beyond the federal government

submitted 4 hours ago • 0 comments

How many people have to die before people stop acting like this is a fucking game

submitted 22 hours ago • 11 comments

Oof. Not only is Musk way out of his depth in this faux cost-cutting crusade, his team is also grossly unqualified. Read this entire @donmoyn.bsky.social piece. It also offers a great explainer about 18F. open.substack.com/pub/donmoyni...

submitted 8 hours ago • 3 comments

The Trump admin is killing aid programs en masse, contrary to what it told a federal court. One program is for extremely malnourished babies -- who may die within hours without treatment. The program costs $120k / month. www.propublica.org/article/trum...

submitted 1 day ago • 29 comments

I got laid off today, with the rest of 18F. 18F was an elite federal software shop. We made gov't websites work better, more efficiently for the American people. We saved taxpayers from getting screwed over by contractors. And were fired for it. We made this website to tell our story: 18f.org

submitted 1 day ago • 3181 comments

👇🏼🧵

submitted 2 days ago • 8 comments

who would want this in their community? this was some of the saddest news out of the US this week & there was plenty.

submitted 1 day ago • 2 comments

I worked at 18F once. We would start projects with a discovery sprint where we would come in and talk to users in an agency and listen to what they actually needed and then build it. Totally antithetical to arrogance of DOGE. No wonder they’d destroy it, they want to make it impossible to rebuild

submitted 1 day ago • 7 comments

18f were a bunch of badasses who actually did make government more efficient in a way that actually worked. And they did it while also being good people who cared deeply for the work, for each other, and for the people that used it.

submitted 1 day ago • 10 comments

WaPo spiked Erik Wemple's column on changes to the opion desk. This is a bad look: geneweingarten.substack.com/p/spiked

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

Please enjoy my last ever post at Climate.gov/ENSO Blog. This afternoon I was fired by the Trump Administration 15 days before my 2yr probationary period ended on March 13. I have worked at NOAA since 2010, and I'm so incredibly proud of the work I did. If anyone wants a quote, let me know.

submitted 2 days ago • 278 comments

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

“The values of The Post do not need changing. The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners.” — Jeff Bezos, 8/5/13

submitted 4 days ago • 95 comments

Thinking about the op-ed I wrote 7 years ago for the Times where I waved caution signs in front of the excitement over Chance the Rapper buying Chicagoist to "save local news" (spoiler: he didn't). True as ever: folks need to break free from the benevolent billion/millionaires news savior fantasy.

submitted 4 days ago • 2 comments

A deeply depressing time to be a journalist.

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Reminder:

submitted 4 days ago • 30 comments

Freedom is when the boss tells you what to write and think. bsky.app/profile/maxt...

submitted 4 days ago • 63 comments

Tomorrow, I think we should start seeing the surge in federal unemployment figures starting to appear in the weekly jobless claims www.usatoday.com/story/money/... I am tracking the weekly data here github.com/harrisj/trum...

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

NEW: President Trump moved Tuesday to punish a law firm for providing pro bono legal services to Jack Smith as he prepared to face a potential investigation from the Trump administration. He is stripping security clearnces and govt funding from the firm. www.politico.com/news/2025/02...

submitted 4 days ago • 201 comments

Important story by Kirk Carapezza of @gbhnews.bsky.social on financial strains facing college newspapers. As I told Kirk, a print edition isn't strictly necessary, and going mostly digital eliminates much of the strain — as has been the case with The Huntington News at @northeasternu.bsky.social.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Having served as a Moscow correspondent in the early days of Putin's reign, this reminds me of how the Kremlin took over its own press pool and made sure that only compliant journalists were given access.

submitted 5 days ago • 1082 comments

DocumentCloud is back up and running. Everything appears to be functioning properly, but if you run into issues, please email our support team at [email protected].

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

This is the plot of Goldfinger

submitted 5 days ago • 1120 comments

I've been struggling to keep all the Trump storylines straight, so I put together this tracker. We'll update every week day. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/int... w/ help from @kevinuhrm.bsky.social + a lot of bluesky-less colleagues.

submitted 6 days ago • 2 comments

DocumentCloud is currently down due to an issue with our hosting provider. We're investigating the issue and will update when we know more.

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

Missouri agriculture groups are pushing a bill that would exempt some information about major water users from being made public.

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

From a FOIA perspective, "the entire federal workforce should write down and email what they did last week" is extremely funny

submitted 7 days ago • 198 comments

(AP) — Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team is eliminating jobs at the vehicle safety agency that oversees Tesla and has launched investigations into deadly crashes involving his company’s cars. #OligarchEra 🇺🇸 apnews.com/article/musk...

submitted 8 days ago • 258 comments

BREAKING: The Associated Press sues three Trump administration officials over access to presidential events, citing the First Amendment.

submitted 9 days ago • 365 comments

To recap, a person the DOJ was arguing wasn’t in a position of responsibility is now ordering federal employees to respond to file a weekly progress report or be terminated — www.politico.com/news/2025/02...

submitted 8 days ago • 5 comments

This is 1/4th of a CFPB

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Would love to see a history of "mother's maiden name" becoming one of the go-to pieces of security information, and the efforts to stop using it.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Our own David Van Riper spoke with @kairyssdal.bsky.social for Marketplace. Democratizing access to the world’s social and economic data for current and future generations - that's core to our mission. www.marketplace.org/2025/02/20/w...

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

Continuing to play with Rust. I wrote an implementation of a small Python library we use in @documentcloud.org (just as an experiment; not actually using it in production) chrisamico.com/blog/2025-02...

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

Dismantling the Dept of Ed or disrupting functions like enforcing critical civil rights laws or halting IDEA funding could affect students with disabilities across the US. The number of public school students with Individualized Education Programs may surprise you: www.urban.org/urban-wire/h...

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

Alas, this Mississippi newspaper's editorial DID get taken down, thanks to the inane decision by a local judge, spurred on by thin-skinned municipal officials. BUT -- the screenshots are below, and you are more than welcome to repost them!

submitted 11 days ago • 2 comments

" People were crying. It was surreal," said one visitor who was at the JFK Library Tuesday. "We were with a gentleman who had just come in from Canada who said, 'I don't understand what's happening in your country.' "

submitted 11 days ago • 10 comments

If Trump or others say something that’s demonstrably not true, don’t say “without evidence.” Say it’s not true.

submitted 11 days ago • 3 comments

1/ Meta just announced it's deleting everyone's Facebook livestream archive in 30 days. In places like #HongKong, media outlets' precious record of news events, like the 2019 demos, will be lost.

submitted 11 days ago • 2 comments

“America Needs a Working-Class Media.” God yes, amen to this piece by @alissaquart.bsky.social. The Economic Hardship Reporting Project gets stories about inequality into places that wouldn’t cover it well (if at all) on their own. It’s such important work. www.cjr.org/analysis/ame...

submitted 11 days ago • 2 comments

This is good news for Austin. Other than the semi-mythical local-rich-guy-who-just-wants-to-support-journalism-and-has-no-political-opinions-or-friends-of-his-own — a very rare species — Hearst is about as good as a local newspaper owner gets today. www.houstonchronicle.com/business/art...

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Wow: City of Clarksdale, Mississippi got a court order yesterday directing a newspaper to delete an editorial criticizing city officials -- without a hearing. Here's the TRO issuing the prior restraint:

submitted 11 days ago • 258 comments